Top 60 Quotes & Sayings by Martin McDonagh
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British playwright Martin McDonagh.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
Ireland was an idyllic place for us as children. We had all these cousins and all this green countryside. Given what I've written about rural Ireland, my memories of it are all blue skies and endless play.
I hope there's some kind of morality in all my work.
I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.
I can't stand up in front of people. It just fills me with horror.
When I'm happiest writing is just not knowing where it goes and just let the characters bring you there.
I never really tell anyone what I'm writing beforehand because I usually don't know what it will be.
Dublin people think they are the center of the world and the center of Ireland. And they don't realize that people have to leave Ireland to get work, and they look down on people who do.
When you've got good actors, they're going to come up with good stuff, but you're never quite sure how the dynamics are going to work between them.
I went to Bruges for a weekend away from London. I was supposed to be meeting a girl there the next day. It was a tentative arrangement. From the moment I saw the town, I thought, 'This place is just so cinematic, so gorgeous.' Every corner seemed to offer a new image.
All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.
When I started out, I was very vociferously against theatre or what I saw theatre as being, so I tried to make my plays the opposite of that - something a bit more cinematic. I'm a film kid, so I'll never have the same love of theatre as I do of movies. It's just the way I was brought up.
Though it may not seem like it, I never try to write about a place, per se; it's always, first and last, about story. Story is everything. Story and a bit of attitude.
With a stage play, they can't cut a word; you can be in rehearsals every day, you cast it, you cast the director, too; the amount of control for a playwright is almost infinite, so you have that control over the finished product.
I think as a writer you never have to flee from fame because you're not that visible in the first place, but, after the Broadway success of 'Beauty Queen,' people were coming up to me all the time, and I wasn't really prepared for that level of attention.
My plays are always pushing towards cinema anyway. They're down and dirty, real and more fun.
'Beauty Queen' will always be a favourite because I think it's a really tight play, and when it's done right, there is a sadness to it that I love.
I don't feel I have to defend myself for being English or for being Irish, because, in a way, I don't feel either. And, in another way, of course, I'm both.
It's like two years straight out of your life doing a film. It's very enjoyable, especially working with the guys, but I kind of like the idea of traveling and growing, and developing as a writer and as a filmmaker.
There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That's where the real art lies. See, I always suspect characters who are painted as lovely, decent human beings. I would always question where the darkness lies.
I guess I've accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be. It's too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness.
I realize that I am never going to grow up.
Plays were really my last option. The reason I didn't write plays initially was because I thought theatre was the worst of all the art forms.
The fact that ticket prices are way too expensive, and there's only one bunch of people going to see Broadway shows, is something I've never liked.
I won't work on anyone's else's script. I won't write for anyone else. I write my own stuff and make that when the time is right.
I'm not really into the fame side of things, so I'm very happy with making a film every four years or so.
I fell into the theatre because I felt I was doing it well, and I stuck to it for the same reason.
There's no point in me meeting with a bunch of producers or studios, because I'll write my own scripts in my own time.
I've learned not to be such a show-off and to have a bit more empathy with humanity. Or at least to fake that.
I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We're all cruel, aren't we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that's what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with.
I don't write all the time. But if I'm writing something, I'll just bang into it every day until it's finished. I write pretty quickly.
I never, ever drink while writing. Never have from the start, and I'm happy that I never have to. A lot of my stuff is plot-driven and mathematical, and I think you need a clean and sober mind to pin down the logistics of that.
When I heard the Pogues, I connected with the songs immediately, but it was also the first time I didn't reject out of hand the kind of music that my parents had always tried to push on to us when we were growing up.
I'd love to do something like 'A Canterbury Tale,' because I love the English language.
My usual trick with the Irish plays is to set things on islands I've never been to.
I don't even subscribe to writer's block being a truthful thing. I've had writer's laziness quite often. But I think it's all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I've always been ok at that.
I pick and choose what I want to do at any given time, and what not to do, importantly. My agents, I won't hear about any offers or options.
I can go anywhere. In fact, for 'Three Billboards,' I was just getting on trains around America. I wrote everywhere from New York to New Mexico. I always write with pencil and paper.
I don't find it easy for me to talk about me.
I've always been very honest about what's good and bad in my writing. That honesty might have made me sound arrogant sometimes, when I was talking about work I thought was good.
I try to naturally keep things to a manageable storytelling length, which is about two hours, so you try to cut out anything extraneous.
I never lie in interviews.
I seldom feel comfortable in a theatre. I always feel like I own a cinema. I feel equally happy in an empty one as a full one. Probably happier in an empty one!
I probably haven't had enough gay characters in my stuff. When you're writing something, you're thinking, 'Why couldn't this person be black, white, gay?'
Everything went perfectly on 'In Bruges.' It was constant warfare, but I won all the battles and was really happy working with the actors and everything on the film.
As a kid, as a poor-ish, working-class kid, even visiting America seemed like an impossible dream. Every time I ever went anywhere in America, it always felt cinematic and dreamlike and like a movie from the '70s or something.
'Pulp Fiction' is an amazing film, and I haven't made one nearly as good.
I've got a fondness for rabbits.
Theatre was an art form that I didn't really respect, and because I wanted to shake it up and do different things on stage, I was able to combine all the things I'd learnt through writing on my own.
I never feel like a smug or a smart-alec film director, and there are plenty of those around.
I loved 'The Master' a lot. I'm not going to get to work with Daniel Day-Lewis, but Joaquin Phoenix is one of the best around, I think.
It doesn't feel like you're preaching, if you can say something in a joke.
An Irishman I am, begora! With a heart and a spirit on
me not crushed be a hundred years of oppression. I'll be getting me
shillelagh out next, wait'll you see.
I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We're all cruel, aren't we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that's what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with. I hope the overall view isn't just that though, or I've failed in my writing. There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That's where the real art lies.
I like traveling and I like not being part of the film world. Especially when you're in the middle of a junket, you're thinking, "I'm not doing this again for four years!"That's about taking time and finding the right story and being in a happy place in life where you can joyfully tell a story. I'm not really into the fame side of things, so I'm very happy with making a film every four years or so.
If you've got time to waste, you might as well waste it listening to people.
I love actors. Part of that is my theater background and being a writer who cares about performance. Actors have usually chosen their profession because they have a dream of doing it and they want to express something about the world. That's the same thing that I have with writing. Most of the good actors get into it for those reason, rather than for reasons of fame or fortune, or anything like that, and that's where I'm coming from, as a storyteller.
It isn't about being or not being dead, it's about what you leave behind
It's the way that I think about the world, and the way that I like to tell stories - I don't think you should get too heavy. There's enough out there, in the world, with violence. I think that comedy lightens the heaviness [of the world].
I'd just like to thank everybody who was involved in the film, especially Brendan Gleeson and Ruaidhrí Conroy. And Ruaidhrí, I'm sorry that you couldn't be here tonight but I hope next time, if they let you into the country.
It's the periods and the commas that you have to forget about. The words never change, but the intonations change.
Related Authors
Abi Morgan Quotes
Welsh
Playwright
Arthur Miller Quotes
American
Playwright
August Wilson Quotes
American
Playwright
Eve Ensler Quotes
American
Playwright
George Bernard Shaw Quotes
Irish
Playwright
George C. Wolfe Quotes
American
Playwright
Jeff Lindsay Quotes
American
Playwright
Lynn Nottage Quotes
American
Playwright
Moliere Quotes
French
Playwright
Noel Coward Quotes
English
Playwright
Plautus Quotes
Roman
Playwright
Richard Brinsley Sheridan Quotes
Irish
Playwright
Robert Greene Quotes
English
Playwright
Sam Shepard Quotes
American
Playwright
Tony Kushner Quotes
American
Playwright
William Shakespeare Quotes
English
Playwright